Radical Right Reality Check

The far right's desperate energy policy prescriptions

It is a familiar theme. We've all witnessed and participated in it in our own lives and watched it unfold countless times in history books, Shakespeare, other works of literature, movies and television. You know the pattern, it goes like this:

A figure of great drive and determination rises to power or prominence - usually, at least in part, as a result of some character flaw or questionable act. Ultimately, after a period of preeminence, the flaw starts to exert itself and the figure begins his or her fall. Toward the end, he or she often flails wildly, desperately and futilely struggling to rekindle the old magic. Rather than seeing the forest for the trees and acknowledging his or her shortcomings, the figure is blinded by megalomania and digs an ever-deeper hole. In the final act, the tragic figure is either forcibly brought down or quietly led away, muttering about what went wrong.

Sometimes this pattern applies not just to individuals, but to groups and institutions and even ways of thinking. And so it is today with the fossil fuel industry and its paid apologists and defenders in the market fundamentalist think tanks. Rather than acknowledging the fact that its era is nearing an end (and, indeed, that it has become a profound threat to the long-term well-being of the planet), the fossil fuel defenders cling desperately to the past.

Supplies dwindling? Prices shooting through the roof? The U.S. importing 70% of its oil from the world's most volatile places?  No problem - let's just get more aggressive with the policies we're already pursuing! All America needs to do is commence off-shore drilling along the North Carolina coast and the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Or maybe start developing oil "shale" from the Rocky Mountains. Yeah, that's the ticket! That area has two trillion "barrels" worth of "oil" locked away for our exploitation. Before you know it, we'll be launching a new oil boom and on our way to another hundred years of cheap gasoline and all the "freedom" that comes with it.

As absurd as these "solutions" sound, they are, in fact, exactly what we've been hearing from segments of the fossil fuel industry and far right think tanks in recent months. Here in North Carolina, the role of loyal, never-say-die sycophants to the mad King Petroleum are, predictably, being filled by the true believers at the Locke Foundation and Pope-Civitas Institute. Both groups have been dutifully touting the "drill and mine our way to happiness" line ever since Big Oil and the Cheney-Bush administration issued the directive a few months ago. Recently, both groups put out new "think" pieces in which they again renewed the call for full-speed-ahead environmental exploitation. 

Drill, drill, drill. Dig, dig, dig.

The latest piece of energy policy propaganda from the Civitasers is entitled "Talking about energy: Drill Here, Drill Now." It includes six "talking points for a plan to lower gas prices today."  Among the key "insights":

• Market speculators (the group widely blamed for some of the recent oil price spikes) are actually good guys who should be encouraged;
• Drilling "now" will lower the price at the pump now -even if the results won't be known for years;
• Sixty-eight per cent (or maybe it's 60%) of North Carolinians support "drilling" (click here and go to #22 to see laughably inadequate poll question);  
• There should be no taxes on oil industry profits at all.

Over at the other voice in Raleigh's pro-fossil fuel tag team, the new, big idea is the revival of the long-discredited plan to unearth large swaths of the mountain west in hopes of squeezing out some of the not-quite-yet fossil fuel that one can find in so-called "oil shale." According to a piece entitled "How to Win the Shale Game," the big roadblock to developing this potential energy bonanza is those rotten, no good environmental activists. It seems that these freedom haters are doing their best to prevent companies from tapping this giant resource because of, among other things, their diabolical desire to impose "radical change in lifestyles" and to "socialize the economy."

In the mode of many an advisor to a doomed autocrat under siege, the author claims that our problems are all the fault of activists who "drastically exaggerate" the potential risks of oil shale development and hope for oil prices to remain high so that Americans will change their behavior. "It's this kind of thinking," the author claims, "that currently has environmental groups and their allies politically on the run."

Reality Check

Of all the delusions that plague the market fundamentalists, few are more glaring than the strange and warped view that they harbor of their ideological adversaries. As we have noted in the space before, while there are certainly a few back-to-nature environmental activists who imagine and desire wholesale changes in human living patterns, these are not the people who are bringing about the gradual demise of the fossil fuel economy.

That inevitable and ongoing demise is the direct result of several objective facts that are apparent to thinking people of all political persuasions and lifestyles, nationalities and economic policy orientations - at least those who want their children and grandchildren to have cause for hope.

The single most obvious of these many facts is this: The world biosphere is in crisis. Like uncounted species before them, humans are despoiling their habitat (in this case the livable parts of the planet itself) faster than it can recover. This is resulting in the rapid extinction of innumerable species and the potentially catastrophic warming of the atmosphere and oceans. A chief contributing factor to this crisis is the exponential growth in the use of fossil fuels.  

In such an environment, it is hardly "radical" or "socialist" to loudly and repeatedly question the sanity of proposals that threaten ruinous environmental impacts in newly exploited areas only so that we can extend our worldwide heroin-like addiction to carbon-based fuels for a few more decades.

Off-shore drilling for oil and natural gas off of North Carolina is and always has been a bad idea - both because of its potential to wreck our precious and precarious coast line and because it will do little or nothing to advance the cause of building a sustainable energy system. It won't even make a meaningful impact on the price of gas!

Likewise, oil "shale" is the energy policy equivalent of the preposterous "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative that has robbed the U.S. economy of hundred of billions of dollars in recent decades - a fantastically expensive and impractical pipe dream. Here's what you need to know about "oil shale": To get one tank of gasoline, you will need under the best case scenario to somehow suck the "oil" (kerogen, really) out of a ton of rock deposits with the energy density of a potato. Even the best case scenarios for milking such unimaginably vast tracts of the earth's crust contemplate the use of huge amounts of energy that will, itself, create vast new amounts of CO2.      

It is in light of such a reality (and the glaring political and economic problems that confront the world today), that a growing chorus of people — capitalist entrepreneurs and suburban soccer parents, Evangelical Christians and young computer geeks — are saying "enough!"

Here, for instance, is the CEO of Shell Oil Company, Jeroen van der Veer, discussing global warming:      

"For us, as a company, the scientific debate about climate change is over. The debate now is about what can do about it. Businesses, like ours, should turn CO2 management into a business opportunity and lead the search for responsible ways to manage CO2, use energy more efficiently and provide the extra energy the world needs to grow…. With fossil fuel use and CO2 levels continuing to grow fast, there is no time to lose."

Heck, even Pat Robertson is convinced.    

Going forward

Every faltering regime, institution or ideology always seems to have a few die hard believers who remain committed to the lost cause - sometimes even after their erstwhile leaders have seen the writing on the wall and started to move on. Fortunately, in most instances, there is little that these naysayers can do to stop the march of history. Let's hope that scientific and political reality make similarly quick work of those who cling desperately to a fossil fuel economy - even as it has already begun to kill them and us.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under Radical Right Reality Check. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.